Ch28 — Notable People & Oral Histories

28.1 What this chapter is, and what it is not

Emery County’s story is, in the end, a story about people: the Ute and Paiute families whose seasonal rounds had crossed Castle Valley for centuries before settlement; the Sanpete colonists whom Brigham Young directed eastward in 1877; the Welsh, Cornish, Greek, Italian, and Slavic miners whose surnames still fill the cemeteries above Hiawatha and Mohrland; the schoolteachers and midwives, sheriffs and stake presidents, cartographers and cowboy poets who, between them, made a place out of a stretch of high desert. This chapter cannot list every one of them — a county that grew from about 550 residents in 1880 to roughly 9,800 in 2020 has produced too many lives for any single volume to encompass. What Ch28 offers instead is a representative gallery: a few dozen biographical sketches, organized by the role each person played, that point readers toward the deeper apparatus where genealogy and oral history live.

That apparatus is older and richer than most readers realize. The Emery County Progress has been published continuously since 1 September 1900 (Bruce L. Olsen, “A History of the Emery County Progress-Leader and its Predecessors,” BYU 1965); the Daughters of Utah Pioneers compiled Castle Valley: A History of Emery County in 1949; the Emery County Archives in Castle Dale holds family papers, photographs, and rare books donated over a century. Brigham Young University’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Utah State University’s Fife Folklore Archives, and the Utah State Historical Society’s Oral History Program all hold Emery County material. Where a person here gets a paragraph, those collections often have a folder, a tape, or a transcript.

The chapter is also forthrightly incomplete by design. A companion file, the Ch28 People Research Queue (Ch28_people_queue.md), accepts new entries on a rolling basis as fieldwork, family history, and archival research surface them. Readers who recognize a missing name — or who hold an oral history their grandmother recorded in 1972 — are warmly invited to contribute.

28.2 Indigenous voices and elders

Long before the county was platted, Castle Valley sat at the seam of Ute, Paiute, and (further back) Fremont and ancestral Puebloan worlds. The biographies of these earlier inhabitants are not preserved in newspaper morgues or county histories; they live, where they live at all, in tribal oral tradition, in the petroglyphs treated in Chapter 12, and in the personal memory of contemporary tribal members. The Encyclopedia handles this section with the same protocols established for Chapters 8–13: it sketches what collaborative scholarship has documented, names no individuals where doing so would violate cultural protocol, and reserves the section for pre-publication review by representatives of the Northern Ute Indian Tribe, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and (for ancestral Puebloan and Hopi connections to the Swell) the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office.

What the public record does preserve is the names of late-19th-century Ute leaders whose movements brushed Castle Valley as the reservation system closed in around their ancestral grounds — figures already treated in Ch10. Within the encyclopedia’s lifetime, the most important biographical work on Indigenous Emery County is being done not in this volume but in the consultation records of the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry and San Rafael Swell co-stewardship process, in tribal historic preservation offices, and in oral-history projects led by tribal members themselves. Ch28 acknowledges that work, and defers to it.

28.3 Founding pioneers, 1875–1900

The first wave of Mormon settlement reached the valley in the late 1870s. The figure who organized that wave is Orange Seely (1843–1918), born 20 February 1843 in Nashville, Lee County, Iowa Territory, and called from Mount Pleasant in Sanpete County to lead colonists across the divide. Seely coordinated the platting of Castle Dale beginning in 1877, transforming the valley’s transient herding grounds into nucleated settlements with irrigation systems and defensive fortifications. When the Emery Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized on 9 May 1880, Seely was set apart as first counselor to stake president Christian G. Larsen, with William Howard as second counselor — a role he held until 1899 (Seely Genealogical Society in-memoriam page; Find a Grave 50526297). Orange Seely’s son Hyrum Seely (1881–1939) carried the family civic role into the second generation; his branch is the same line from which Edwin Montell Seely later emerged.

Around Seely and Larsen gathered the names that recur in every settlement roster: Henry U. Burr and his father, who took up homestead and timber claims; Rasmus Johnson, an early settler at Emery; Joseph E. Johnson, Hyrum Nelson, and others whose biographies the History of Sanpete and Emery Counties (1898) records in the older nineteenth-century manner — paragraphs of birth, marriage, and “served as bishop.” The Daughters of Utah Pioneers monument at the Castle Dale courthouse lists the founders by community: Castle Dale, Ferron, Huntington, Orangeville, Cleveland, Elmo, Emery, Green River. Each name on that monument has a folder, somewhere, in a descendant’s filing cabinet — and Ch28’s invitation is that those folders find their way into the Emery County Archives.

28.4 Frontier ranchers, cowboys, and outlaws

The settlement era’s other founding population came on horseback. Sid, Charlie, Rod, and Joe Swasey arrived in Castle Valley and the San Rafael Swell in 1875 — earlier than most of the platted-town founders — and worked the country as cowboys and prospectors for the next half-century. They captured wild horses with traps built from twisted juniper, prospected gold and silver, and later uranium; they named Eagle Canyon (so deep, they said, that an eagle couldn’t fly out); their family name marks landmarks throughout the Swell, including the Sid’s Mountain Wilderness Study Area established under the 2019 Dingell Act provisions. The famous “Outlaw” photograph of Joe Swasey was taken by C.J. Layton in 1912 and is now held by Utah State University. The interpretive sign at the family’s old camp summarizes the legacy plainly: “The Swaseys never became rich, but they enriched the lore of the West” (Four Brothers interpretive sign, San Rafael Swell, photographed 2026-04-05; cross-ref Ch20 §20.7, Ch30 §30.4).

The Swell’s reputation as a hideout drew figures of more national notoriety. Robert LeRoy Parker — Butch Cassidy — and his partner Elza Lay robbed the coal-mine payroll at Castle Gate (Carbon County) on 21 April 1897 and galloped their horses south into the San Rafael Swell to escape; the Wild Bunch used the Swell’s interior canyons repeatedly between 1896 and 1900 (Utah History to Go, “Butch Cassidy”; Utah History Encyclopedia, “San Rafael Swell”; PBS, Butch Cassidy and the Outlaw Trail). Cassidy is properly a regional figure rather than an Emery County citizen, but the canyon system that made his career is fully within the county’s borders, and Ch28 records him here in that role.

Other queue entries — Kathleen Teasdale, contributor of the “Horse Sign at Home Base” photograph on the Four Brothers sign; Ned Chaffin and other cattle-trail figures whose details remain to be researched — await further fieldwork.

28.5 Coal-camp leaders, miners lost, and labor

When the railroad reached Carbon County in 1883 and the coal seams of the Wasatch Plateau opened to industrial extraction, Emery County gained a second population: the miners and their families. Coal-camp life on the Hiawatha–Mohrland–Black Hawk side of the plateau is treated in Chapter 17; what this chapter records is the men and women who led those camps and the men and women who died in them.

The bishops of the camp wards — Welsh, Cornish, and Mormon by turn — administered both the LDS congregations and, in practice, much of camp social life. Greek Orthodox priests of the Carbon-Emery coal county served Hiawatha and Helper from before World War I; the Italian and Slavic foremen of the deep mines were the everyday leadership of underground work. Their individual names mostly live now in coal-camp cemeteries and family recollection rather than in published biography — a gap Ch28 flags for fieldwork.

What is fully on the record is the toll. The Wilberg Mine fire of 19 December 1984 killed 27 miners, the worst coal-mine fire in Utah history. The Crandall Canyon Mine collapse of 6 August 2007 trapped six miners; a rescue-tunnel collapse on 16 August 2007 killed three rescuers attempting to reach them. The Crandall Canyon Memorial, dedicated 14 September 2008 in Huntington, holds nine bronze deep-relief portraits sculpted by Karen Jobe Templeton. In 2016 a community fund of $170,000, spearheaded by former miner Frank Markosek (an MSHA inspector who participated in the Crandall Canyon rescue) and Dennis Ardohain, established the Emery County Miners Memorial at the Museum of the San Rafael in Castle Dale, naming 123 men and 1 woman lost to mining accidents across Carbon and Emery counties (KSL News; Deseret News; Salt Lake Tribune; Mining Connection; cross-ref Ch17 §17.7).

28.6 County builders — commissioners, sheriffs, clerks

A small county runs on a small group of public servants. From the county’s organization in 1880 to the present, the three-member Emery County Commission has been the central civic body; alongside it the offices of sheriff, clerk-auditor, treasurer, attorney, and assessor have rotated through dozens of families. As of 2024 the commission seats are held by Lynn Sitterud, Jordan Leonard, and Keven Jensen, with Carol Cox serving as Deputy Clerk-Auditor (Emery County Commission Meeting Minutes, 2024). A comprehensive roster of historical commissioners, sheriffs, and clerks remains to be compiled from archival minutes — one of Ch28’s standing research tasks.

The roads, fairgrounds, courthouse, and water systems that hold the county together also bear the names of their builders. Ch18 (Rails, Roads & Infrastructure), Ch19 (Water for the Desert), and Ch23 (County Governance) carry the institutional history; Ch28’s contribution is to record the people: the road foreman, the ditch boss, the clerk who hand-drew the original plats. Family memory and the Emery County Progress obituary archive are the primary sources here, and the county-builder sketches that appear in this section will grow chapter by chapter as more obituaries are catalogued.

28.7 Educators, physicians, and midwives

Schooling and medicine on the frontier were intensely personal trades. The Emery Stake Academy (founded 1890; treated in Ch24) brought the first cohort of trained teachers to the county; subsequent generations passed through the three-school era (Castle Dale, Ferron, Huntington high schools) and, after 1962 consolidation, Emery High and Green River High. USU Eastern (formerly the College of Eastern Utah, formerly Carbon College) carried the region’s higher-education thread. Each of those institutions has had a founder, a long-tenured principal or dean, and a roster of beloved teachers whose names recur in alumni reunions; Ch28 will fill that roster as oral histories arrive.

Frontier medicine in Emery County was largely the work of midwives and lay practitioners until the early twentieth century, with itinerant physicians serving the coal camps and the larger towns. Castleview Hospital (Carbon County, opened 1957) became the regional acute-care center for both counties. The names of the women who delivered most of the county’s babies before 1920 deserve particular preservation, and the LDS ward histories — alongside Daughters of Utah Pioneers files — are the best surviving record.

28.8 Religious leaders

The Emery Stake organized 9 May 1880 with Christian G. Larsen as its first president; presidents and bishops since are catalogued chapter by chapter in Ch25. Two points belong here. First, the Relief Society presidents of the early wards — women who organized the food storage, the fast-offering distribution, the funeral suppers, and the quilting circles — were as influential in pioneer Emery County as the bishops, and their biographies are systematically under-recorded. Second, the non-LDS clergy of the coal camps left their own legacy: the Presbyterian missionaries who ran the Ferron mission school 1906–1950s, the Catholic priests who served the Italian and Slovenian families of Hiawatha, and the Greek Orthodox clergy of the Helper-Hiawatha cluster. Each denomination preserves its own clergy roster; Ch28 collects the names that crossed into Emery County’s wards and parishes.

28.9 Writers, historians, and artists

The county has produced a remarkable concentration of writers and historians for its population. Stella McElprang compiled Castle Valley: A History of Emery County for the Daughters of Utah Pioneers in 1949 — a 343-page community-authored reference that remains, three-quarters of a century later, one of the most cited sources in this encyclopedia. McElprang’s method — gathering pioneer recollections from ward members across the county and weaving them into a single volume — is the foundation that every later Emery County historian, including Geary and Seely, has built upon (cross-ref Ch26 §26.4).

Edward A. Geary (b. 1939), native of Huntington, took his bachelor’s at the College of Eastern Utah, his master’s at Brigham Young University, and his doctorate at Stanford in 1971. He served as professor of English and director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU before retiring as emeritus. Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood (1985) — “Poplarhaven” was Geary’s private boyhood name for Huntington — gathers twenty-three essays of Castle Valley life; The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah (1992) opens the literary geography of the Wasatch Plateau; A History of Emery County (1996) is the county’s standard modern reference. Geary represents the county’s contribution to American literary nonfiction at its most refined (cross-ref Ch26 §26.5).

Edwin Montell Seely (5 February 1934 – 12 August 2008) was Castle Dale’s pageant master. In 1978 he formed the committee that produced the Castle Valley Pageant, wrote its script, and shepherded the production through three decades; the pageant has since become one of the longest-running LDS pioneer pageants in Utah. Beyond the pageant Seely wrote a large Emery County History (1981), Seely family histories (1988, 1996), and Castle Valley Pageant History (2003). He died on 12 August 2008 during a handcart re-enactment in Fairview Canyon when the cart was struck by a truck — a death that the pageant community has commemorated each year since (Seely Society in-memoriam page; Deseret News 2008-08-13; Church News 1991-08-10; cross-ref Ch26 §26.7 and Ch27 §27.6).

The county’s painters, photographers, fiddlers, quilters, cowboy poets, and documentary filmmakers — many catalogued in Ch26 — round out the cultural roster. Their biographies appear here in brief; Ch26 carries the full treatment.

28.10 Newspaper editors and the Progress

For one hundred and twenty-six years the Emery County Progress has been the county’s newspaper of record. Its first edition appeared 1 September 1900 under the editorship of H.T. Haines, who issued the paper’s mission statement in the eighth issue, 20 October 1900 (Olsen, BYU thesis 1965). The masthead has changed many times since: the paper merged with the Green River Leader in 1963 to become the Emery County Progress-Leader; reverted to Emery County Progress in 1977; passed through the long editorship of Kimble Larsen; and continues today under the Emery Telcom / ETV News umbrella, with the complete archive 1900–2018 digitized through Utah Digital Newspapers (announced by ETV News, 2024). Editors and publishers since Haines comprise a who’s-who of county civic life, and Olsen’s 1965 thesis remains the only systematic account of the masthead’s changes; a follow-on history covering 1965–2025 is one of the standing tasks the encyclopedia hopes a future researcher will undertake.

28.11 Oral history programs and archives

Emery County’s biographical record is held across five overlapping institutions, and any researcher beginning a Ch28 entry should know all five.

The Emery County Archives in Castle Dale is the local repository: rare books, photograph collections, donated family papers, and county records, available to researchers in a public reading room (https://www.emerycountyarchives.com/; https://emery.utah.gov/home/department-directory/archives/). Brigham Young University’s L. Tom Perry Special Collections carries the largest manuscript holdings, indexed under the subject heading “Emery County (Utah) — History” (https://archives.lib.byu.edu/subjects/5022); pioneer diaries, Geary’s working papers, and stake-history files all live there. Utah State University’s Fife Folklore Archives, established 1972 and one of the largest American folklore repositories, preserves student fieldwork from Castle Valley and the coal counties. The Utah State Historical Society Oral History Program partners with county historical societies — including Emery — to record and transcribe interviews; the society’s 2024 Oral History Toolkit gives the methodology in detail (https://history.utah.gov/utah-state-historical-society/oral-history-program/). Finally, FamilySearch’s Emery County, Utah Genealogy wiki page serves as the gateway to vital records, ward records, and cemetery indices (https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Emery_County,_Utah_Genealogy); its companion Genealogy Trails — Biographies from Emery County Utah page (http://genealogytrails.com/utah/emery/bios.html) extracts public-domain nineteenth-century sketches from the 1898 History of Sanpete and Emery Counties and similar volumes.

A reader who knows those five doors can find almost any Emery County life that has left a paper trail.

28.12 The Ch28 People Research Queue, and the future of biographical preservation

This chapter ends not with a closing summary but with a queue. The file Ch28_people_queue.md, kept alongside this chapter in the project repository, accepts new biographical entries on a rolling basis: a name, dates, a source, key facts, the chapters the person is relevant to, and a status (raw / researched / drafted). The queue currently holds entries for Sid, Charlie, Rod, and Joe Swasey, and for Kathleen Teasdale; it will hold dozens more before this volume goes to press.

Two larger trends will shape Ch28’s future. First, digitization. The Utah Digital Newspapers project has put the Emery County Progress online; FamilySearch is indexing the LDS ward records; the Emery County Archives is steadily scanning its photograph collections. The biographies that were once locked in attic boxes are becoming searchable for the first time. Second, AI-assisted transcription. The 2020s revolution in audio transcription has made it possible — for the first time since recording technology entered Castle Valley in the 1930s — to convert oral histories from cassette and reel-to-reel into searchable text at scale. Family-history nights at the LDS stake center, scout-troop oral-history merit-badge projects, and USU Eastern student fieldwork can now feed directly into transcripts that the encyclopedia and the County Archives can ingest.

For Indigenous biographies, the future is collaborative rather than technological: the encyclopedia will not publish Section 28.2 in its present form without review by representatives of the Northern Ute Indian Tribe, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, and will revise that section in response to their guidance.

In the end the chapter is an invitation. The lives sketched here are the lives the county already knew it had. The lives in the queue, and the lives still to be added, are the ones the county will recognize once a grandchild, a neighbor, or a researcher contributes them. Ch28 is open; readers who hold a story that belongs in it are asked to write — to the Emery County Archives, to the encyclopedia’s editor, or to both.

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Sources

• “Emery County, Utah.” Wikipedia, accessed 2026-05-04. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emery_County,_Utah.
• History of Sanpete and Emery Counties, Utah: With Sketches of Cities, Towns and Villages (W.H. Lever, 1898), Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/historyofsanpete00leve/historyofsanpete00leve_djvu.txt.
• McElprang, Stella. Castle Valley: A History of Emery County. Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1949. (Source review at FamilySearch https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/records/item/327807-castle-valley-a-history-of-emery-county.)
• Geary, Edward A. Goodbye to Poplarhaven: Recollections of a Utah Boyhood. University of Utah Press, 1985. https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/goodbye-to-poplarhaven/.
• Geary, Edward A. The Proper Edge of the Sky: The High Plateau Country of Utah. University of Utah Press, 1992.
• Geary, Edward A. A History of Emery County. Utah State Historical Society / Emery County Commission, 1996. http://www.riversimulator.org/Resources/History/UtahCounties/HistoryOfEmeryCounty1996Geary.pdf.
• Olsen, Bruce L. “A History of the Emery County Progress-Leader and its Predecessors.” M.A. thesis, BYU, 1965. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4995/.
• Seely Genealogical Society. “Edwin Montell Seely (in memoriam).” https://www.seeley-society.org/about/in-memoriam/edwin-montell-seely/.
• “Orange Seely Sr. (1843–1918)” — Find a Grave Memorial 50526297. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/50526297/orange-seely.
• “Hyrum Seely (1881–1939)” — Find a Grave Memorial 74624465. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74624465/hyrum-seely.
• “Edwin Montell Seely (1934–2008)” — Find a Grave Memorial 28968472. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/28968472/edwin-montell-seely.
• “Castle Valley Pageant a community classic.” Deseret News, 2012-08-01.
• “Castle Valley Pageant rolls on after founder dies.” Deseret News, 2010-08-03.
• “Castle Valley Pageant depicts struggles, faith of pioneers.” Church News, 1991-08-10.
• “Trek tragedy: 2 die when truck hits handcart near Fairview.” Deseret News, 2008-08-13.
• “Butch Cassidy.” Utah History to Go. https://historytogo.utah.gov/butch-cassidy/.
• “The San Rafael Swell.” Utah History Encyclopedia. https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/s/SAN_RAPHAEL_SWELL.shtml.
• Crandall Canyon Mine. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_Canyon_Mine.
• “Family, friends, neighbors honor lost Emery County miners with memorial.” KSL.com, 2016-06-12. https://www.ksl.com/article/40167000/.
• “Coal miners’ memorial rises from tragedy, honor and community sacrifice.” Deseret News, 2015-08-30.
• Crandall Canyon Mine Memorial — Clio. https://www.theclio.com/web/entry?id=26403.
• Emery County Archives. https://www.emerycountyarchives.com/; https://emery.utah.gov/home/department-directory/archives/.
• BYU L. Tom Perry Special Collections, “Emery County (Utah) — History” subject portal. https://archives.lib.byu.edu/subjects/5022.
• Utah State Historical Society Oral History Program. https://history.utah.gov/utah-state-historical-society/oral-history-program/; Oral History Toolkit, May 2024. https://history.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Oral-History-toolkit-1-2.pdf.
• USU Special Collections — Fife Folklore Archives and Community Improvement Through Local History Project. https://digital.lib.usu.edu/digital/collection/p16944coll19.
• FamilySearch — “Emery County, Utah Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Emery_County,_Utah_Genealogy.
• Genealogy Trails — Biographies from Emery County Utah. http://genealogytrails.com/utah/emery/bios.html.
• Utah Digital Newspapers — Emery County Progress. https://digitalnewspapers.org/newspaper/?paper=Emery+County+Progress.
• “History Preserved: Complete Emery County Progress Collection Digitized.” ETV News. https://etvnews.com/history-preserved-complete-emery-county-progress-collection-digitized/.
• “Four Brothers” interpretive sign, San Rafael Swell, photographed 2026-04-05 (Ch28 People Research Queue).

Proposed Maps / Figures / Photographs

1. Portrait of Orange Seely (Find a Grave / Seely Society) — §28.3
2. “Sid & Charlie” Swasey photograph (Swasey Family courtesy; Four Brothers sign) — §28.4
3. “Joe in the ‘Outlaw’ Photo” — C.J. Layton, 1912, courtesy USU — §28.4
4. Crandall Canyon Mine Memorial bronze portraits, Huntington (Karen Jobe Templeton) — §28.5
5. Wilberg / Emery County Miners Memorial wall, Museum of the San Rafael, Castle Dale — §28.5
6. Edwin Montell Seely portrait (Seely Society in-memoriam) — §28.9
7. Edward A. Geary author photograph (BYU faculty page, fair-use under university release) — §28.9
8. Castle Valley (1949) dust-jacket and Stella McElprang photograph — §28.9
9. Emery County Progress first issue, 1 September 1900 (Utah Digital Newspapers) — §28.10
10. Reading-room photograph, Emery County Archives, Castle Dale — §28.11
11. Oral-history recording session illustration (UHS toolkit imagery) — §28.11
12. Map of Emery County with biographical pins for each person profiled — §28.12

Proposed Tables

• Table 28-A — Emery Stake presidents 1880–present (cross-ref Ch25)
• Table 28-B — Emery County Commissioners by decade (skeleton; needs archival fill)
• Table 28-C — Major fatal mining incidents in Emery County, with dates and counts
• Table 28-D — Emery County Progress editors / publishers timeline 1900–present
• Table 28-E — Oral-history collections holding Emery County material, with catalogue links

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Engagement Features

Did You Know?

• Orange Seely was the first counselor in the Emery Stake presidency from 1880 to 1899 — nineteen years of continuous service before the automobile reached Castle Dale.
• The Swasey brothers’ “Outlaw” photograph dates to 1912, fifteen years after Butch Cassidy left the Swell — the brothers were still working the country a generation after the famous outlaws were gone.
• The Emery County Progress has published continuously since 1 September 1900, through two world wars, a depression, and four boom-and-bust cycles in coal — one of the longest continuously running weeklies in Utah.
• 123 men and 1 woman are named on the Emery County Miners Memorial in Castle Dale.

Family Activity

Take a Saturday afternoon and visit the Emery County Archives in Castle Dale. The reading room is open to the public; ask the archivist what donations the archives are currently looking for. Bring an old family photograph, a great-aunt’s journal, or a photocopy of a homestead patent — most family papers that come into the archives arrive in a single banker’s box, and the difference between a memory that survives and one that vanishes often hinges on a single afternoon’s drive.

Youth Challenge

Choose one of your four great-grandparents. Find out (a) where they lived in 1920, (b) what they did for work, and (c) one thing they were known for in their community. Sources to start with: an older living relative, the Emery County Archives photograph index, FamilySearch’s Emery County wiki, and any 20th-century Emery County Progress obituary you can locate. Write a one-page biographical sketch in the style of this chapter and add it to the Ch28 People Research Queue.

Field Trip — A Half-Day of Lives

Castle Dale loop, three stops, four hours.

• Stop 1. Museum of the San Rafael, Emery County Miners Memorial (Castle Dale). Read every name on the wall.
• Stop 2. Emery County Archives (Castle Dale, near the courthouse). Sit in the reading room for thirty minutes; ask to see one folder of pioneer-era photographs.
• Stop 3. Crandall Canyon Mine Memorial in Huntington (15 miles north of Castle Dale on SR-10). Karen Jobe Templeton’s nine bronze portraits are best visited in late-afternoon light.

End the day by writing one paragraph about a person whose name appeared at all three stops, and add it to the People Research Queue.

Photo Assignment

Photograph one family headstone in any Emery County cemetery. Note the dates, any inscriptions, and the cemetery’s name and town. Then look the person up on FamilySearch. If their entry is sparse, add what you know from the headstone and attach the photograph to the FamilySearch profile. The encyclopedia will accept queue submissions sourced this way.